After 12 years and almost 20,000 posts it's time to move away.

[BainsBane]

150. The party is clearly more liberal than it was a decade ago

As is clear by the issues the nominee and her challengers raised during the primary as well as the platform currently being created.
We just had Democratic representatives stage a sit in in the House, which followed a filibuster in the Senate, challenging one of the most powerful corporate lobbies in the nation--the gun lobby. In terms of global climate change, our nominee's plan is far more extensive that most, with a series of policies designed to wean America off fossil fuels, which is why she has been endorsed by most of the nation's environmental groups. https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/climate/
The GOP doesn't even recognize the existence of global climate change. The contrast between the two parties couldn't be more stark. Throwing up your hands is a good way to ensure nothing is done to address the environment. It's hard for me to believe that can possibly be a reason to move away from the Democratic Party. It simply doesn't make sense in terms of policy positions advanced by the party and its candidates.

DU terms of service has always required support for Democratic candidates, but when Democrats didn't hold power I suppose it was easier to feign that. Now that the Democratic Party is engaged in building coalitions necessary to enact actual policies, it requires more than just knee-jerk opposition.

The rest of my comments are not directed at you but rather general observations about some of the disenchantment with the Democratic Party.

I've seen on another site where people claim themselves too progressive to support the Democratic nominee that they plan on voting for Trump. Those same people argue that Democrats and DU complain too much about racism, and that the "real racism" is the "political correctness" directed against white people and white men in particular. They also speak about our nominee with a plethora of misogynistic slurs that I wouldn't repeat in any company. They make clear that their opposition to the Democratic Party is due to its increasing diversity that reflects the changing face of America.

Those most angry at the results of the primary, insistent that the elections were all stolen, are the same people who schemed to find ways to exclude the votes of "Southerners' and "confederates"--non-white voters--who favored Clinton and who in fact make up the base of the Democratic Party. For those whose notion of "equality" or "progressivism" requires excluding those votes and the concerns of those voters are in fact regressive rather than progressive. Despite their use of the term "progressive" as a club, they seek to move back in time, which is by definition regressive. Of course it is impossible to turn the clock back, all the more so when the past sought is idealized and willfully ignores the rampant inequality that characterized earlier eras hearkened back to.

It looks to me like we are seeking a continuation of the party realignment that began in the mid-1960s. People who pretend to be on the left are announcing an intention to vote for Trump because they so resent the growing influence of women and people of color in a nation they believe should be fixed in a past when the majority was excluded from political power, equal rights, and economic opportunity. The racial and gender divide in politics may indeed be growing even more, but the Democratic Party is not the loser in that scenario because it continues to better represent the concerns of the electoral majority, even if the composition of that electoral majority has changed over the past fifty years.